I was living in Missoula, Montana in the summer of 2002. The U. S. was ratcheting up the war of words against Iraq. The American military was preparing for war there (note the active verb) and the American public was being prepared (note the passive verb) for war there. The First Presbyterian Church of Missoula held a series of midweek lectures that summer (lectures with discussion, it turned out) and one of the lectures had to do with this increasing bellicosity toward Iraq. The church membership was mostly conservative but some of its members were faculty at the University of Montana and they were mostly liberal.
I was there for the lecture on Iraq. It was given by a faculty member whose name I have forgotten, but I will never forget his pitch to the congregation. He was warning against the impending invasion of Iraq in the strongest terms. He was warning a gathering of his friends, nearly all of whom thought that removing Saddam Hussein, that “Hitler of the Middle East,” was our duty. The speaker made a good case against the war, but it was a pretty standard case. I could have made it, myself. But he got a hearing for his point, which I would not have been able to do, by talking about all the nights he and a lot of his fellow members stayed after meetings to finish washing up the dishes. He apologized to another section of the congregation whom he addressed as “my fishing buddies,” for the contentious nature of the argument he was making. He was wonderful. I understood why he was so well received in a church that had no ears at all for his message.
Afterwards, I had a conversation with an old man with a very heavy German accent. I am going to try to represent the accent in the way I spell his words because I want you to be able to “hear” what I heard. The old man said, “I know vere ziss iss goink. I haff heard all ziss before.”
My blood ran cold. I knew he had heard it from Hermann Goering in the 1930s. He heard it over loudspeakers, and all the radio stations, and saw it on the “newsreels” in the theaters. This is the Goering who said:
“Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
This week, I have been feeling a little bit like that old German man. Muammar el-Qaddafi is getting more reprehensible by the day, following the path by which Sadaam Hussein got more deplorable by the day. For people who pay any attention at all to public affairs and who are old enough to remember the run-up to the Iraq War, this has got to sound familiar. We may be excused for feeling, “I haff heard all ziss before.”
So just how bad is Kadafi? We can’t know, of course, so I have another way of approaching the question. How bad do we need him to be? I think someone who knows more of the facts on the ground in Libya and on the proper floor of the Pentagon could work out a correspondence that would help us. I’m thinking of something like this.
1a. Kadafi is a pompous hypocrite.
1b. We are trying to draw that attention of potential allies to the need for some action against Libya.
2a. Kadafi is terrorist.
2b. We have begun efforts to isolate him diplomatically and economically
3a. Kadafi has unleashed the power of a brutal regime against his own people.
3b. We have decided to neutralize his air defenses and to ground or destroy his air force.
4a. Kadafi is a clear and present danger to everyone and has a stock of mustard gas that he will unleash on anyone he deems an enemy.
4b. We are about to begin bombing civilian targets in Tripoli and are making “surgical strikes” against buildings where Kadafi or his family might be hiding.
We could go on, of course. I am not saying that any particular charge about Kadafi is untrue. I don’t really know. My point is that if they are true, they were always true—he took over in 1969, when my 50 year-old daughter was not yet 10—and the information we can glean from which ones are trotted out is best treated as the information that will justify whatever we are preparing to do next.
I know that’s cynical and it may not be fair, but I haff heard all ziss before and I am deeply uncomfortable.
Footnotes:
1. I haven’t made a study of this, but my guess is that the spelling of his name is going to get stranger and more foreign-looking by the day. Imagine a time when we referred to him as “Uncle Mo-Mo” in the way we were taught to refer to “Uncle Joe” Stalin after the U.S.S.R. became our ally in World War II. He could then become “Colonel Kadafi,” which isn’t that bad since there are U. S. colonels as well. And maybe after a few references to that title, it might just be “the Colonel,” to call up the notion of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Then we could go to the whole name, Moamar Kadafi—the pronunciations would vary, I am sure from NPR to Fox News—and get, eventually, to the form I saw in the New York Times today, Moamar el-Qadaffi. Notice the –el (strange and foreign-sounding) and the substitution of Q for K as the first consonant. Short of “Adolf el-Qadafi,” I don’t know where else there is for us to go.
2 Should it become necessary, we can always begin referring to Libya by its official name, “Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.”
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
And All the Teachers Are Above Average
Garrison Kiellor has gotten a lot of laughs over the years with his sign-off line about Lake Wobegon, where “all the kids are above average.” It’s funny the way he tells it, but if I ever wanted to get serious about it, there are a few questions I would want to ask.
Let’s start with this one. Is “strawberry” an above average ice cream flavor? Like me, you want to go to whether its popularity is above average, but you’ll notice that isn’t what I asked. If you ranked all the flavors just on their goodness, would you have an average? I don’t see how. So strawberry would not be either above or below that average.
You hear a lot about states that are above average in the quality of education they provide. This isn’t completely senseless, like the ice cream example, but it isn’t as good as you might think at first. First you test everyone at a certain grade level and you arrange all the scores from high to low. Now you have an average, so you will have states that are above average. But to get that average, you had to sell your soul. It didn’t hurt all that much did it?
To get the average, you had to agree that by “education” you mean the results of the math and writing scores. You have to agree that what the test measured was what the schools were trying to teach. And you have to neglect the costs to everything else that are usually incurred by schools in pursuit of high achievement scores. You also have to pretend that the pattern of students who are sick on the days the tests are given is really entirely random; the students who missed taking the test are just the average mix of students, not mostly the low-scoring students as they appear to be.
And it’s worse for teachers. I got shoved down this road by a columnist snickering about the very high percentage of teachers who call themselves “above average.” Of course, we know by this point in the post that there is nothing odd about that at all. If you start with the idea that each teacher is trying either to teach in the way he does it best or to teach in the way appropriate for this particular group of students, you will have a really stirring variety of teaching styles. Some will be based on sober contemplation; some on raucous dispute; some on focused complexity; some on sensitivity to nuance. And if you were foolish enough to propose that all those styles by measured by a single metric—you know, so you could have an average—you really ought to be laughed out of the building and on a good day, you would be.
I would be very much surprised if I were not at the top 10% of teachers who are trying to do what I am trying to do—if there are any. How many teachers are trying to do what I am trying to do, do you suppose?
So the really funny thing about Garrison Kiellor’s signoff is not so much the good humored poke at Wobegonians. The really funny thing is why we think it is funny.
Let’s start with this one. Is “strawberry” an above average ice cream flavor? Like me, you want to go to whether its popularity is above average, but you’ll notice that isn’t what I asked. If you ranked all the flavors just on their goodness, would you have an average? I don’t see how. So strawberry would not be either above or below that average.
You hear a lot about states that are above average in the quality of education they provide. This isn’t completely senseless, like the ice cream example, but it isn’t as good as you might think at first. First you test everyone at a certain grade level and you arrange all the scores from high to low. Now you have an average, so you will have states that are above average. But to get that average, you had to sell your soul. It didn’t hurt all that much did it?
To get the average, you had to agree that by “education” you mean the results of the math and writing scores. You have to agree that what the test measured was what the schools were trying to teach. And you have to neglect the costs to everything else that are usually incurred by schools in pursuit of high achievement scores. You also have to pretend that the pattern of students who are sick on the days the tests are given is really entirely random; the students who missed taking the test are just the average mix of students, not mostly the low-scoring students as they appear to be.
And it’s worse for teachers. I got shoved down this road by a columnist snickering about the very high percentage of teachers who call themselves “above average.” Of course, we know by this point in the post that there is nothing odd about that at all. If you start with the idea that each teacher is trying either to teach in the way he does it best or to teach in the way appropriate for this particular group of students, you will have a really stirring variety of teaching styles. Some will be based on sober contemplation; some on raucous dispute; some on focused complexity; some on sensitivity to nuance. And if you were foolish enough to propose that all those styles by measured by a single metric—you know, so you could have an average—you really ought to be laughed out of the building and on a good day, you would be.
I would be very much surprised if I were not at the top 10% of teachers who are trying to do what I am trying to do—if there are any. How many teachers are trying to do what I am trying to do, do you suppose?
So the really funny thing about Garrison Kiellor’s signoff is not so much the good humored poke at Wobegonians. The really funny thing is why we think it is funny.
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Searching for the Concept 2
As you know, I have been trying to work with a collection of half-baked formulations with only one little curb—it’s not about me—to tell me when I’ve gone too far. There ought to be a way—other than the one Trail Blazers example I offered—to talk about subordinating the role of the individual to the success of the team without talking just about sports. I’m particularly interested in how that focus can sustain a marriage.
I try to clarify this notion in the context of teaching. I think that works as far as it goes. Then I try to define courtship in a way that opens it to the distinction I am working with. Then, finally, I take that courtship distinction and apply it to a marriage where the partners have and pursue a goal that is both intimate and collegial and which—the curb, again—is not about me. This essay takes me as far as I have thought about this. It ought to be a little while before I venture back.
I said I wanted to try teaching next. It is not hard to imagine a classroom setting where the interests of the teacher and of the students are opposed. The best the students can do is “we win some and he wins some.” But every gain of ours is a loss for him and vice versa. It is, more briefly, a zero-sum relationship.
I imagine there will always be some of that around the edges, but I can think of a way that it need not be at the heart of the relationship. I’m thinking of a classroom relationship that might be called coaching. In this relationship, I am the professor and “they” are the students. We agree that a certain skill—let’s say telling the difference between the axis on which an argument turns and the positions that define that axis—is something they want to learn and that I am both willing and able to teach.
So I set up a series of tasks that will both teach this skill and measure the progress of the students toward mastery. Then I teach them lesson one: an axis is the name of the argument you are proposing. They want to learn this skill and I want to help them. They make mistakes; I correct them; they are grateful for the help. They go back at the task and make fewer mistakes. I verify the correct answers and indicate just what it is about the incorrect answers that makes them incorrect. They go back at it and establish their mastery in this skill.
They are satisfied; I am satisfied; we are satisfied. Every advance on their part is a win for me as well as a win for them. They drink in both the praise and the criticism because each, in its own way, moves them toward achieving the goal we both have. That’s what I had in mind by coaching.
Once you are in that kind of a relationship—a relationship defined by mutual commitment to a task—it all just flows. But there are so many ways of not being in that relationship. I don’t want to teach them in the way they learn best. They don’t want to be there at all. They want to be there so long as “the performance” is entertaining, but not longer than that. If they don’t have a goal that is out there, then I can’t help them reach it and they have no reason to accept my part of the process, particularly the criticism, at all. Inside this relationship, they throw off the potentially discouraging criticisms as just another way to make progress. They accept but don’t focus on praise as just another way to make progress. They don’t take the positive things as good in themselves or the negative things as insulting. They could feel that way, in another setting, but here in this relationship, those feelings are accepted just as steps to our common success.
I’d like to look at a more complicated relationship now. You could call it “dating,” but I am going to call it “courtship.” In my way of thinking about it—admittedly not the only way—dating is what you do so you can decide whether you want to court her and by which she decides whether she wants to be courted. There is, or might be, a common goal in courtship. The only common goal in the relationship I called “dating” is the collection of information necessary to a well-informed and wise decision.
I cued this up to some degree in the last post.
I want to look, also, at what I think of as the two halves of friendship. I call them intimacy, by which I mean that we look at each other and build the relationship, and colleagueship, by which I mean that we stand side by side and pursue our common goal. A relationship that is only intimate runs the risk of being fragile and ingrown. A relationship that is only collegial runs the risk of being superficial and, in the absence of the task, meaningless.
The piece of this relationship that is most like the coaching I described above is the collegial part. The romantic couple has a common goal and each values the other at least in part for what the other can contribute to the common project. Imagine an Audubon Bird Census in which George says, “I want Mary on my team; she is better than anyone I know at identifying juvenile gulls.” Now let’s just take George at his word. We are not considering any other aspect of his relationship with Mary or where they will have to go at what time of day in whatever kind of transportation to see these gulls. He values her for her contribution to a project that means a lot to both of them.
But if George and Mary are the ones courting/being courted and this is all there is in the relationship, it isn’t going to be much of a relationship. And we could add half a dozen other more broadly plausible common goals, like playing soccer or campaigning together or going to a party or planning a bagel party or reading to each other aloud or listening to a complex piece of music and having surveyed all those activities, we would not have added anything at all to the relationship beyond collegiality.
So, let’s consider intimacy. As I picture collegiality side by side, I picture intimacy face to face. The questions I ask in an intimate relationship are, “Do you know who I am?” and “Do you like who I am?” Crucial questions, obviously. And, for a long term relationship, there is the matter of still knowing who you are twenty years down the road, twelve of them consumed by childcare, and still liking who you are. So it isn’t a one-time question.
But if that’s all there is, there is a very rapid, very fragile feedback loop set up in which the understanding and affiliation of the partner are all that matters. I breathe in your approval and take sustenance from it as I would take oxygen from the air. Every time I breathe in this intimate relationship and get no oxygen, there is a momentary panic. I have to have it and I have to have it all the time and I always know whether I am getting it or not.
There is no common goal here. There is deep, immediate, and fundamental nourishment. It’s vitally important. But it’s fragile. When I am that fixed on you and don’t get what I need, how to I react? Do I withdraw, discouraged or confused? To I redouble the effort to get something on the next pass (and maybe frighten you)? I don’t just not react.
Let’s go back for just a moment to the teaching situation. Professor criticizes student. Student does not attend to the criticism—it’s not about him—but to the meaning of the criticism for the mastery of the project. There’s no fragility here. It’s not about me; it’s about how to make “it” better. But in intimacy, there is no “it.” It’s just you and me and my needs and your needs and my hopes and fears and yours.
So in a friendship—a relationship in which there is both collegiality and intimacy—how do you set goals that allow me to take what I learn in the intimate part of the relationship and make it not JUST about me. It’s about me; it’s intimate. But it’s about something else too. Maybe it’s about who I’m slipping into being with you without knowing it. Maybe it’s about my missing a chance to engage in some part of your life that is really important to you. Maybe everything I say gets “taken the wrong way,” and only afterwards do I realize that I was angry about something and that’s why “you misunderstood what I was saying.”
Those are all pretty common events in a close relationship. What do we need to rescue them? We need something like an “intimate goal.” Nothing I have said so far has put those two words together. The goals I described didn’t have intimacy and the intimacy didn’t have any goals. But how about “being the person for you that I promised I would try to be?”[1] Let’s say I want urgently to be that person for you. It is deep in my heart to want that. I want it more than I want to be approved for whatever it is I am doing. If I had a goal like that, I could—I could; it would be possible—take your criticism with grace.
I could say that “it isn’t about me;” it is about my deep desire to be this kind of person for and with you. You might say that is splitting hairs, but I think I can see a little daylight between “me” and “that person I want to be for you.” And if so, then I can take your criticism the way the students took my criticism. With this goal, I take her criticism in my hand as if she had handed me a hammer so I could finish up a project we were both working on. Which is exactly true. My being this person for her is, in fact, a project we are both working on and on behalf of which she dares to make the criticism and I dare to receive it as a gift.
I know that can be done. I have seen it done. I have even done it myself a few times. I have done it enough, at least, to know how hard it is to do. I think it does take the marvelous robustness of collegiality and introduce it into the fragile glory of intimacy.
But I still don’t know what to call it.
[1] If the promise was part of a marriage ceremony, I slipped out of the courtship phase, but it doesn’t have to be. People in courtship make promises. Don’t they?
I try to clarify this notion in the context of teaching. I think that works as far as it goes. Then I try to define courtship in a way that opens it to the distinction I am working with. Then, finally, I take that courtship distinction and apply it to a marriage where the partners have and pursue a goal that is both intimate and collegial and which—the curb, again—is not about me. This essay takes me as far as I have thought about this. It ought to be a little while before I venture back.
I said I wanted to try teaching next. It is not hard to imagine a classroom setting where the interests of the teacher and of the students are opposed. The best the students can do is “we win some and he wins some.” But every gain of ours is a loss for him and vice versa. It is, more briefly, a zero-sum relationship.
I imagine there will always be some of that around the edges, but I can think of a way that it need not be at the heart of the relationship. I’m thinking of a classroom relationship that might be called coaching. In this relationship, I am the professor and “they” are the students. We agree that a certain skill—let’s say telling the difference between the axis on which an argument turns and the positions that define that axis—is something they want to learn and that I am both willing and able to teach.
So I set up a series of tasks that will both teach this skill and measure the progress of the students toward mastery. Then I teach them lesson one: an axis is the name of the argument you are proposing. They want to learn this skill and I want to help them. They make mistakes; I correct them; they are grateful for the help. They go back at the task and make fewer mistakes. I verify the correct answers and indicate just what it is about the incorrect answers that makes them incorrect. They go back at it and establish their mastery in this skill.
They are satisfied; I am satisfied; we are satisfied. Every advance on their part is a win for me as well as a win for them. They drink in both the praise and the criticism because each, in its own way, moves them toward achieving the goal we both have. That’s what I had in mind by coaching.
Once you are in that kind of a relationship—a relationship defined by mutual commitment to a task—it all just flows. But there are so many ways of not being in that relationship. I don’t want to teach them in the way they learn best. They don’t want to be there at all. They want to be there so long as “the performance” is entertaining, but not longer than that. If they don’t have a goal that is out there, then I can’t help them reach it and they have no reason to accept my part of the process, particularly the criticism, at all. Inside this relationship, they throw off the potentially discouraging criticisms as just another way to make progress. They accept but don’t focus on praise as just another way to make progress. They don’t take the positive things as good in themselves or the negative things as insulting. They could feel that way, in another setting, but here in this relationship, those feelings are accepted just as steps to our common success.
I’d like to look at a more complicated relationship now. You could call it “dating,” but I am going to call it “courtship.” In my way of thinking about it—admittedly not the only way—dating is what you do so you can decide whether you want to court her and by which she decides whether she wants to be courted. There is, or might be, a common goal in courtship. The only common goal in the relationship I called “dating” is the collection of information necessary to a well-informed and wise decision.
I cued this up to some degree in the last post.
I want to look, also, at what I think of as the two halves of friendship. I call them intimacy, by which I mean that we look at each other and build the relationship, and colleagueship, by which I mean that we stand side by side and pursue our common goal. A relationship that is only intimate runs the risk of being fragile and ingrown. A relationship that is only collegial runs the risk of being superficial and, in the absence of the task, meaningless.
The piece of this relationship that is most like the coaching I described above is the collegial part. The romantic couple has a common goal and each values the other at least in part for what the other can contribute to the common project. Imagine an Audubon Bird Census in which George says, “I want Mary on my team; she is better than anyone I know at identifying juvenile gulls.” Now let’s just take George at his word. We are not considering any other aspect of his relationship with Mary or where they will have to go at what time of day in whatever kind of transportation to see these gulls. He values her for her contribution to a project that means a lot to both of them.
But if George and Mary are the ones courting/being courted and this is all there is in the relationship, it isn’t going to be much of a relationship. And we could add half a dozen other more broadly plausible common goals, like playing soccer or campaigning together or going to a party or planning a bagel party or reading to each other aloud or listening to a complex piece of music and having surveyed all those activities, we would not have added anything at all to the relationship beyond collegiality.
So, let’s consider intimacy. As I picture collegiality side by side, I picture intimacy face to face. The questions I ask in an intimate relationship are, “Do you know who I am?” and “Do you like who I am?” Crucial questions, obviously. And, for a long term relationship, there is the matter of still knowing who you are twenty years down the road, twelve of them consumed by childcare, and still liking who you are. So it isn’t a one-time question.
But if that’s all there is, there is a very rapid, very fragile feedback loop set up in which the understanding and affiliation of the partner are all that matters. I breathe in your approval and take sustenance from it as I would take oxygen from the air. Every time I breathe in this intimate relationship and get no oxygen, there is a momentary panic. I have to have it and I have to have it all the time and I always know whether I am getting it or not.
There is no common goal here. There is deep, immediate, and fundamental nourishment. It’s vitally important. But it’s fragile. When I am that fixed on you and don’t get what I need, how to I react? Do I withdraw, discouraged or confused? To I redouble the effort to get something on the next pass (and maybe frighten you)? I don’t just not react.
Let’s go back for just a moment to the teaching situation. Professor criticizes student. Student does not attend to the criticism—it’s not about him—but to the meaning of the criticism for the mastery of the project. There’s no fragility here. It’s not about me; it’s about how to make “it” better. But in intimacy, there is no “it.” It’s just you and me and my needs and your needs and my hopes and fears and yours.
So in a friendship—a relationship in which there is both collegiality and intimacy—how do you set goals that allow me to take what I learn in the intimate part of the relationship and make it not JUST about me. It’s about me; it’s intimate. But it’s about something else too. Maybe it’s about who I’m slipping into being with you without knowing it. Maybe it’s about my missing a chance to engage in some part of your life that is really important to you. Maybe everything I say gets “taken the wrong way,” and only afterwards do I realize that I was angry about something and that’s why “you misunderstood what I was saying.”
Those are all pretty common events in a close relationship. What do we need to rescue them? We need something like an “intimate goal.” Nothing I have said so far has put those two words together. The goals I described didn’t have intimacy and the intimacy didn’t have any goals. But how about “being the person for you that I promised I would try to be?”[1] Let’s say I want urgently to be that person for you. It is deep in my heart to want that. I want it more than I want to be approved for whatever it is I am doing. If I had a goal like that, I could—I could; it would be possible—take your criticism with grace.
I could say that “it isn’t about me;” it is about my deep desire to be this kind of person for and with you. You might say that is splitting hairs, but I think I can see a little daylight between “me” and “that person I want to be for you.” And if so, then I can take your criticism the way the students took my criticism. With this goal, I take her criticism in my hand as if she had handed me a hammer so I could finish up a project we were both working on. Which is exactly true. My being this person for her is, in fact, a project we are both working on and on behalf of which she dares to make the criticism and I dare to receive it as a gift.
I know that can be done. I have seen it done. I have even done it myself a few times. I have done it enough, at least, to know how hard it is to do. I think it does take the marvelous robustness of collegiality and introduce it into the fragile glory of intimacy.
But I still don’t know what to call it.
[1] If the promise was part of a marriage ceremony, I slipped out of the courtship phase, but it doesn’t have to be. People in courtship make promises. Don’t they?
Friday, March 11, 2011
A Living Language
I don’t know whether language is “living,” as some say, but I do know that language users are living. They have preferences about meanings of words; they have preferences about the ease of communication. And, ordinarily, they will act on those preferences.
So let’s begin by asking, as President Bartlet asked of a “proportional response,” in the first season of The West Wing, “What is the virtue of a proportional response? Why is it good?" In the context of military retaliation, it’s an interesting question, but today I just want to look at the word virtue. It derives from the Latin vir = man; that’s man as in a male human. Derivatively, a virtue is manliness of some sort and by extension a valued quality of some sort. So, laying the etymology aside, a virtue is “moral excellence; right action and thinking; goodness or morality.”
Since I first learned of this derivation, I have had quite a few quiet smiles about stories that feature young women losing “their virtue” only because "losing their manliness" seems so discrepant in that context. In fact, in some cultures, boys gain their “virtue” in the same act and at the same moment that the girls lose theirs. Isn’t language wonderful?
I got to thinking of this when a Rose Festival Princess—for those of you who don’t live in Portland, RFP is a big deal—told about how she put aside the views of all those people who criticized her for the way she looked and declared herself to be beautiful. I have nothing but respect for her courage in standing up for herself, but I think she is going to have to share the language with people who have meant other things by that word for many years now.
The Princess said, ““I broke through my shell and learned that I am beautiful not because I am glamorous and perfect, but because I am a strong, intelligent, confident and capable young woman.” That is a perfectly adequate meaning of the word for internal speech, but when she starts talking to other people, and particularly if she wants to be understood, she is going to have to look at that word again. Will people use the word beauty to mean “strong, intelligent, confident, and capable young woman?” No. They won’t.
I have seen panels of legislators browbeaten until they were willing to call every failure “a challenge” and every disabled person a “differently abled person.” But when the browbeating witness had departed, eyes were collectively rolled and the word that was used in the statutes being discussed was used again. Challenge is now used as “challenge,” and given a little ironic stress so that the coach who calls falling behind in the first half by 45-12 a “challenge” will not be taken by the interviewer or the television audience to be an idiot. It will be “a challenge” for us, says the coach, with that little facial twitch that serves as “air-quotes.”
The users of language are living and they respond to impediments by surmounting them or finding new paths. If, ten years from now, there are “beauty contests,” to see which young women are most strong, most intelligent, most confident, and most capable, there will be some other contest—called something else, surely—for those women who meet that culture’s standards for physical attractiveness.
Sometimes you just can’t make people use words the way you would like and I say that as someone who has often tried and sometimes succeeded. I do have a thought experiment for you, though. One of my practices has been to collect English words that mean “of, by, or pertaining to [some kind of animal].” So I can talk about the feline qualities of cats or the hirsine qualities of goats or the vulpine qualities of foxes. By the same logic, I can speak of the anatine qualities of ducks and could even, with conventional rules in use, speak of “anatinity,” a noun referring to those anatine qualities. Puddles (below) has anatinity, as evidenced by the pushups he did during the football season--one for every accumulated point and this year, there were a lot of accumulated points.
It’s a little quirky, maybe a little word-wonky, but I wouldn’t get a lot of pushback from it. Eye-rolling, maybe. But now let’s say I use anatine in place of virtue. I emphasize the value of “duckliness” rather than the value of “manliness.” If I had enough power and if I were willing to expend it in forcing people to say that an athlete, say, had “deeply anatine qualities” meaning that he or she was a good player, I could get away with it for the moment. It might even compete with "intestinal fortitude."
But in Oregon, where one of the most prominent meanings of Duck is “not a Beaver,” it would be a very hard sell and I don't want to be the one to try it.
So let’s begin by asking, as President Bartlet asked of a “proportional response,” in the first season of The West Wing, “What is the virtue of a proportional response? Why is it good?" In the context of military retaliation, it’s an interesting question, but today I just want to look at the word virtue. It derives from the Latin vir = man; that’s man as in a male human. Derivatively, a virtue is manliness of some sort and by extension a valued quality of some sort. So, laying the etymology aside, a virtue is “moral excellence; right action and thinking; goodness or morality.”
Since I first learned of this derivation, I have had quite a few quiet smiles about stories that feature young women losing “their virtue” only because "losing their manliness" seems so discrepant in that context. In fact, in some cultures, boys gain their “virtue” in the same act and at the same moment that the girls lose theirs. Isn’t language wonderful?
I got to thinking of this when a Rose Festival Princess—for those of you who don’t live in Portland, RFP is a big deal—told about how she put aside the views of all those people who criticized her for the way she looked and declared herself to be beautiful. I have nothing but respect for her courage in standing up for herself, but I think she is going to have to share the language with people who have meant other things by that word for many years now.
The Princess said, ““I broke through my shell and learned that I am beautiful not because I am glamorous and perfect, but because I am a strong, intelligent, confident and capable young woman.” That is a perfectly adequate meaning of the word for internal speech, but when she starts talking to other people, and particularly if she wants to be understood, she is going to have to look at that word again. Will people use the word beauty to mean “strong, intelligent, confident, and capable young woman?” No. They won’t.
I have seen panels of legislators browbeaten until they were willing to call every failure “a challenge” and every disabled person a “differently abled person.” But when the browbeating witness had departed, eyes were collectively rolled and the word that was used in the statutes being discussed was used again. Challenge is now used as “challenge,” and given a little ironic stress so that the coach who calls falling behind in the first half by 45-12 a “challenge” will not be taken by the interviewer or the television audience to be an idiot. It will be “a challenge” for us, says the coach, with that little facial twitch that serves as “air-quotes.”
The users of language are living and they respond to impediments by surmounting them or finding new paths. If, ten years from now, there are “beauty contests,” to see which young women are most strong, most intelligent, most confident, and most capable, there will be some other contest—called something else, surely—for those women who meet that culture’s standards for physical attractiveness.
Sometimes you just can’t make people use words the way you would like and I say that as someone who has often tried and sometimes succeeded. I do have a thought experiment for you, though. One of my practices has been to collect English words that mean “of, by, or pertaining to [some kind of animal].” So I can talk about the feline qualities of cats or the hirsine qualities of goats or the vulpine qualities of foxes. By the same logic, I can speak of the anatine qualities of ducks and could even, with conventional rules in use, speak of “anatinity,” a noun referring to those anatine qualities. Puddles (below) has anatinity, as evidenced by the pushups he did during the football season--one for every accumulated point and this year, there were a lot of accumulated points.
It’s a little quirky, maybe a little word-wonky, but I wouldn’t get a lot of pushback from it. Eye-rolling, maybe. But now let’s say I use anatine in place of virtue. I emphasize the value of “duckliness” rather than the value of “manliness.” If I had enough power and if I were willing to expend it in forcing people to say that an athlete, say, had “deeply anatine qualities” meaning that he or she was a good player, I could get away with it for the moment. It might even compete with "intestinal fortitude."
But in Oregon, where one of the most prominent meanings of Duck is “not a Beaver,” it would be a very hard sell and I don't want to be the one to try it.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
The Concept 1-A
I just had a bad moment. Yesterday, I wrote about the search for the concept. This morning, I read this in The Oregonian.
"Ever since the Trail Blazers reconveded from the All-Star brak last month, coach Nate McMillan has been trying to sell his players on the team concept. with Canby and Roy returning from injury and with the addition of Wallace, McMillan knew minutes and roles could become an issue in the locker room. If the players thought about the team and winning, the coach argued, it 
Or, in other words, it's not about you.
Oh no! Is that the idea I've been struggling to give a name to? Say it ain't so! "Team spirit?" Does it really make any sense to call God and Israel "a team?" Or my PSU students and I "a team?" Bette and me, possibly, but it seems to catch only a few pieces of what feels, as I live it, a much more subtle arrangement.
"Ever since the Trail Blazers reconveded from the All-Star brak last month, coach Nate McMillan has been trying to sell his players on the team concept. with Canby and Roy returning from injury and with the addition of Wallace, McMillan knew minutes and roles could become an issue in the locker room. If the players thought about the team and winning, the coach argued, it
shouldn't matter who was playing or for how many minutes."
Or, in other words, it's not about you.
Oh no! Is that the idea I've been struggling to give a name to? Say it ain't so! "Team spirit?" Does it really make any sense to call God and Israel "a team?" Or my PSU students and I "a team?" Bette and me, possibly, but it seems to catch only a few pieces of what feels, as I live it, a much more subtle arrangement.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Searching for the concept--1
Today’s game is: can you guess what I’m talking about? I will be playing the game along with you, because I don’t know either. I am using as the lighthouse of this exploration, “It’s not about you.” The lighthouse, being built on the land, tells you where you do not want to try to sail your boat.
First I want to remind you of the monomania of Richard Dreyfus’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Like him, I think "this"—what I’m writing about—is important even if I don’t actually know what binds the otherwise disparate elements. I’m trying to climb the mountain Dreyfus is building.
First I want to remind you of the monomania of Richard Dreyfus’s character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Like him, I think "this"—what I’m writing about—is important even if I don’t actually know what binds the otherwise disparate elements. I’m trying to climb the mountain Dreyfus is building.
Let me start where I think this current run started, with the notion of redemption. I was surprised to learn that the Mosaic Law justified the redemption of your kin from slavery and of land from foreign ownership on the grounds that they belong to God. So you have sold yourself into slavery and your kinsman comes and pays the price and redeems you from slavery because it is not right that a person who belongs to God—that’s you by the terms of the Covenant—should “belong” to someone else.
I knew some of that before, but the thing that struck me this time is that the process had nothing at all to do with the qualities of the actual person who needed to be redeemed. The same is true of the land. God not only promised it to “Israel,” but also divided it among the tribes and it is not right for land belonging to one tribe to be permanently owned by another tribe, or, naturally, by a foreigner either. Again, it’s nothing about the land; it’s not especially beautiful or fertile or defensible. It belongs to God and needs to be redeemed.
Starting with these stories caused me to come at one of my own stories from a new side. The approach Bette and I have taken to compromises between us is that they are fine if they are the last option—not so much as the first option. As the first option, we choose to do quite a bit of work on finding a course of action that does all the things for us that need to be done. This came up first, for us, in deciding where to live. She already lived someplace and I already lived someplace. Either would have kept the rain off—a big thing in Oregon—but each was someone’s home court, so we began to ask just what we, the relationship, the priorities we had established for our health and our growth together, needed in a home. This means that a place could be chosen that was “best for us” without our ever considering whether I liked it or she liked it.[1] So theoretically, I could have said about a place we had chosen, that I was enthusiastic about what it would do for us, how well it would meet our needs—“our” in this formulation not meaning hers and mine, but ours—without ever comparing it to the list of personal preferences I would otherwise have used. Again, it’s not about me: at least, not in any narrow sense. It is about me in the sense that the health and stability of “we” matter to me.
Then there is the question of resources and performance.[2] Most of the time, couples approach the question of who is to do what (performance) in a way that takes a certain resource level as fixed and the performance level as variable. So I might take a look at some upcoming event and say I don’t have the interest or the stamina or the patience or whatever, to do it. There are some things that really have to be done, of course, but very few things have to be done with attention and initiative and generosity. There are some things, and marriage is the setting where I know most about those things, that really have to be done that way or it is better not to do them at all.
So, doing it the other way—taking the performance level as fixed and the resource level as variable—I can say, what additional resources[3] would it take to enable me to meet this new challenge successfully? There is no reason to think of “resources” as only those Bette has access to, but that is the line of thought I want to pursue so I will just leave other kinds of situations (like a long run) and other kinds of resources (like carbo loading) for another post.
The situation I am hoping to use to illustrate this principle—which to this point I have not identified at all except “it’s not about me”—is time I am supposed to spend with Bette’s parents being an attractive, affirming, and very responsible husband to their daughter. This a fairly safe example, since Bette’s parents are both dead. Telling them about what their daughter means to me is something I really want to do. It is a part of being Bette’s husband that is not going to get performed if I don’t do it and performing it halfheartedly would be worse than nothing. What to do?
Now comes hard part #1. I say to Bette, “I really want to do this well and I just don’t have the resources to do it. Will you help me?” Maybe any one, certainly any man, reading this will know why that would be hard to do. I am asking Bette to add substantially to my resources so I will be able to do well this thing that we both want me to do well. What’s so hard? I am asking for something that could sound like a personal indulgence for reasons that really, honestly, aren’t about whether I want those resources. It has to do only with whether I will need them to do what needs to be done. If you don’t think that’s hard, you haven’t tried it.
We will leave aside all the states of relationship between a husband and wife that would make this a form of self-immolation. We’ll leave aside the years of careful teaching by which Bette has taught me what constitutes “resources” for her and how I can add to them and vice versa. We’ll leave aside all the demeaning things she could easily say at this point. What she does say is, “Of course I will.”
Now comes hard part #2. Bette does whatever she has learned to do which will have the effect of helping me amp up for the task to come. She does this, as I am telling the story, without reference to what it costs her to do it or whether I deserve additional resources or whether it really ought to take all that much just to spend some time with her parents. Any of those would be easy, especially if there are submerged conflicts in the relationship.
But she doesn’t do any of those. She does the hard thing instead, which is to focus on the resources I will need to do the things we both want me to be able to do and to provide those resources graciously and competently. What’s so hard? She goes out of her way to provide resources for me because she wants to honor my intention to perform well the task that is there to do and because she believes that the outcome we both want can be attained if she does that and may not be attained if she does not. It doesn’t have to do with whether she wants to. It doesn’t have to do with whether I deserve more resources. If you don’t think that’s hard, you haven’t tried it.
So, after saying “Of course I will,” she actually does provide the additional resources.
The evening or the weekend or whatever goes well. Bette is grateful for what I have done. I am happy with what I have done and grateful for the help she gave me. Both of us have learned something about the relationship. I am thinking of two things. The first is that we did well this task that neither of us would have freely chosen or have done well without cooperation. The second is that we are pretty good at this and can trust each other even more fully than it seemed when we began trying to do things like this.
So I ask for the resources I need. The alternative to asking is performing badly. Hard things to do 1a, b, c, d, e, and so on all have to do with trying to be honest about what I want and what I need, being serious about the resources the task will require, asking plainly for what might be considered an unjustified level of support, and so on. And Bette provides the resources I need. Hard to do things 2a, b, c, d, e, and so on all have to do with whether she can trust my assessment, whether she can unhook the question of what I will need (a functional question) from what I deserve (a personal question), considering whether she can do what I am asking, and so on.
All of that—that privileging of what has to do with us and what is required to achieve the common outcome—is “not about me.” And in this case, I say that for Bette as well. She too would say, “It’s not about me.”
NOTE: I see that I shouldn’t go further today. In the next post, I want to look at how I might be able to go about teaching in this same way. I want to look, also, at what I think of as the two halves of friendship. I call them intimacy, by which I mean that we look at each other and build the relationship, and colleagueship, by which I mean that we stand side by side and pursue our common goal. A relationship that is only intimate runs the risk of being fragile and ingrown. A relationship that is only collegial runs the risk of being superficial and, in the absence of the task, meaningless.
I will want to say that this idea—whatever it is—is a good conceptual tool for all of those situations.
[1] Not to get bizarre about it, of course. There would have been things that one or the other of us found really unacceptable personally. I’m taking those for granted.
[2] I’m going to ask for a hall pass on “performance.” For those of you for whom “performance” is only a shortened form of the full expression “sexual performance,” that’s not the kind of performance I’m talking about. For those of you who feel that “performance” is too public and too evaluation-laden a word, I ask only that you follow how I’m using the word so you will see that it isn’t either of those.
[3] What constitutes “resources” will vary a good deal from person to person, of course, but very early in our relationship, Bette helped me make use of Gary Chapman’s five categories (The Five Love Languages) of things that might turn out to be resources for each other. They are: words of affirmation, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. There are many more, but those five suggest the kinds of thing that might be a resource.
Friday, March 4, 2011
This Means Something
Tomorrow, I am going to write a post about an idea I nearly have. Almost. I'm so close to it, but I don't know what to call it and, of course, if you don't know what to call it, you don't really know what it is. Today, I was talking with my brother, Mark, and I remembered that wonderful line from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Richard Dreyfus plays a blue collar worker who has had a vision implanted in his brain. It's pretty distressing. He keeps seeing this same shape and he doesn't know what it means. In this picture, he sees the image in the enormous pile of mashed potatoes he serves himself while his wife and kids watch incredulously. He says, "This means something. This is important."
And that's the way I'm feeling about this idea. I hope it really does mean something. And I wouldn't be too unhappy, either, if it turned out to be important.
Thanks for the picture, Mark. Tomorrow I'm going to start banging the drum again and we'll see what happens.
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